Phil Trinder is a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow and a leading researcher in parallel and distributed programming languages. He has researched Erlang technologies for 20 years, including coordinating the very successful EU RELEASE project to improve the scaling of Erlang. Currently the team at Glasgow are exploring how to detect communication errors in BEAM languages.
The talk presents and demonstrates a new prototype communication checking tool for Erlang codebases: Mailboxer.
If a developer annotates parts of an Erlang codebase with expected message types Mailboxer can statically detect many communication errors in the annotated processes. So errors like unreceived messages, some deadlocks, protocol violations, typos in message tags etc. Finding errors early in development reduces debugging and development times.
Existing session type checkers for Erlang and Elixir enforce channel, rather than mailbox, based communication. In contrast Mailbox types check communication using idiomatic mailbox communication. Currently Mailboxer targets Erlang, but the type theory and checking technology apply to other actor languages with mailboxes, so Elixir, Scala/Akka and others.
Erlang will be the first production language to benefit from a radically new communication checking tool.
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